Kurosawa's electrifying dramatisation uproots the novel's Russian summer setting to a memorable, snowbound Hokkaido - the northern most island of Japan, closest to Russia in climate and custom. Reprieved from a death sentence and fresh out of the asylum, war criminal Kameda is mentally fragile and prone to epileptic fits. In turn, his emotional involvement with two women and his new, increasingly volatile, friend Akama leads further into madness and gross tragedy. Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot, is his only adaptation of a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel and is a darkly ambitious exploration of the depths of human emotion.